“Twilight Sleep,” a comparatively recent discovery, has been much advocated, much praised and much blamed. There may be types of women who find it advantageous, but the fact that it necessitates going to a nursing home, away from home, is very much against its use under ideal circumstances. For those who have no home, or a sordid and overcrowded one, a nursing home may be a place of refuge. “Twilight Sleep” (scopolamine-morphine) is, however, for the more sensitive type of woman, an extremely unreliable drug, which may frequently take no narcotic effect upon the patient, who suffers added agony as the result of relying upon it, and it may be very dangerous for the child. There is also the method of birth through the soft part of the body, avoiding the birth of the child through the bony structure altogether. This operation is described as Cesarean section, and involves incision both through the abdominal walls and through the walls of the womb. For some women with very small bones Cesarean section is necessary if they are to produce living children. Even for women who, by paying the price of agony, can produce children by normal birth, this method may be found very advantageous. I see a possibility of its widely extended future use. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of years hence when the child’s head will be proportionately even larger in comparison with the mother’s bones than it is to-day, it may indeed be the only method which will stand between the higher human races and their total extinction. There is a certain amount of rather gossipy opinion that women who are spared the full torture of child birth do not have equally passionate love for the child. This, however, is nonsense. Love depends far more on the mother’s desire for parenthood at the time of the child’s conception and her feelings towards it all through the months of waiting than on the hours of birth, although the appealing weakness and fascination of a baby may win a deeper love than the mother-to-be expected to feel for her child. APPENDIX C SUGGESTIONS FOR CALCULATING THE DATE OF ANTICIPATED BIRTH The leading authority in the _Manual of Human Embryology_, edited by Franz Keibel and Franklin P. Mall in two volumes, London, 1910, says:-- “In ancient times it was generally believed that the duration of pregnancy in man, unlike that in lower animals, was of very uncertain length; and it was not until the seventeenth century that it was more accurately fixed, by Fidele of Palermo, at forty weeks, counting from the last menstrual period. In the next century Haller found that if pregnancy is reckoned from the time of a fruitful copulation it is usually thirty-nine weeks, and rarely forty weeks in duration. In general these results are fully confirmed by the thousands of careful data collected during the nineteenth century.” * * * * *